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About Michael J. Miller

Miller, who was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine from 1991 to 2005, authors this blog for PC Magazine to share his thoughts on PC-related products. No investment advice is offered in this blog. All duties are disclaimed. Miller works separately for a private investment firm which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

Demo's Top 5 products

Nearly all the products on display at Demo are demonstrations of new software, whether for mobile devices, the Internet, or the PC. So it's strange that two of the most impressive demos would be based, not on software, but on chemistry.

Boston Power's (www.Boston-Power.com) new Sonata line of batteries also sounds great. Like nearly all of today's laptop batteries, these are lithium-ion batteries. But the company says it get to an 80% charge in just 30 minutes compared with an hour or two for conventional batteries. And it says its batteries can go for three years without any degradation in power, compared with 6 months for a conventional battery. HP was on hand to endorse the battery. I haven't been able to ry these yet (the companies is still a few months away from mass production), but it's a great idea. While this first product isn't being pushed as having a long battery life, the company says future products should be able to offer up to 30 percent more battery life. (See here for Lance's take.)

Zoho Notebook is an upcoming online notebook, which lets you combine all sorts of content into a notebook with multiple pages. Any page can have word processing, spredsheet, photography, video, etc.; and you can combine these types of content anywhere on a page. More importantly, these pages can be shared in real time with other people, making it very good for collaboration. I've liked Zoho's earlier collaboration tools, but this could be an even more powerful way for people to work together.

MyDesignIn is a neat web site designed for people remodeling their homes. You sketch out an interactive blueprint of a room, then collect information about specific products for the room from any site on the web into a list that grabs the information from the web sites; and then drag those products into the room. For instance, in the demo, they showed designing a kitchen and choosing and placing a sink in the right location. What makes this special is that it works with any web site, so you can have any furniture or equipment on the web; and that you can easily collaborate with an architect or contractor. It's more of a niche market than a lot of the other products I saw this week, but I can imagine that a lot of people will like it.

Nexo lets you easily create group web sites, with shared calendars, forums, pictures, videos, etc. It lets you blog as a group, and integrates with other web sites and e-mail. What I like about is how simple it is to set up, and how customizable it is.

And here are some runners up:

Symantec showed its Norton Identity Client, which combines things like verifying the identity of the site you are communicating with and the PC you are using; a password manager, and the ability to create one-time use mail addresses and even credit card numbers. It's clearly a work in progress, with Symantec aiming at the 08 versions of its security products, but the concept is great. (See more here - New Symantec Initiative Protects Your Identity)

I can see it working with IronPort's vision of a reputation enhanced Internet, which seems a whole lot closer now that IronPort has been acquired by Cisco.

Adobe showed its Apollo platform, which lets you take web sites created with HTML, Javascript and Flash and turn them into cross-platform desktop applications. It looks like an exension of the firms' Flex architecture but turned into a way of creating programs that work both online and offline. What makes this interesting is this has the possibility of turning into a true cross-platform development tool. (The demo was an eBay desktop application, but the real developer release is a few months off.)

I'm always glad to see new applications aimed at small businesses, which I continue to think is the biggest underserved market. Mission Research showed SalesWorks, a very easy to use desktop application for managing your contacts. It competes with products like Act and Goldmine, but adds "web 2.0" features such as linking in with online mapping sites. It's not quite finished yet, but I like the concept.

And there were a lot of mobile applications. Of these, perhaps the most impressive was from Dart Devices which has technology for easily installing application on mobile phones of different makes and from different carriers.

A number of social networking sites showed up. Pairup is designed for business travelers who can enter their travel information and their contacts, and find out which of their contacts are in the city they are visiting or are going to the same events. Similarly, I like the idea of Attendio, which helps you find local events by using recommendations from friends or celebrity "recommenders." I also like how CircleUp lets you ask questions of your friends and contents, and aggregates the answers together. But in all these cases, I'm not sure that any of these are sites I would use by themselves - instead, I'd like to see these added as features to, or as a mash-up with, a broader social networking site.

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